Been feeling old and out of touch lately, and seeing this was comforting somehow.
I mean, I'm still old and out of touch, but it's nice to see that one particular ancient technology might still be considered the best way to do something.
On the other hand, desktop computers are getting a bit long in the tooth as a concept these days...
Companies pushed for us to install their apps on our phones so they could force ads on us and extract (meta)data from us that they couldn’t from our browsers.
More than half of all web-users have installed ad-blockers.
This is why services are so horny to drive you to install their app rather using their websites: they are trying to get you to do something that, given your druthers, you would prefer not to do. They want to force you to exit through the gift shop, you want to carve a desire path straight to the parking lot. Apps let them mobilize the law to literally criminalize those desire paths.
An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it (or do anything else that wrestles value back from a company). Apps are web-pages where everything not mandatory is forbidden.
Seen in this light, an app is a way to wage war on desire paths, to abandon the cooperative model for co-innovation in favor of the adversarial model of user control and extraction.
And now this corporate brainworm has infected our desktop environments, even Linux ones. Just say no.
Desktop clients came before web apps and a well written (desktop or otherwise) app will always use the platform it’s running on better than a well written web app. Sure there is incentive for corporations to push apps, but saying “it has now infected even Linux” is absolutely ridiculous. Lack of open API is what you should criticize.
If you really want an app-like interface, you could make use of Epiphany’s “Install as Web App” feature. Just open Epiphany, go to your Lemmy instance, login, and then select “Install as Web App” from the main menu. Like magic, you get a “Lemmy App” that you can bring up like any other app.
This is my experience in GNOME. Presumably though, it’d work with any desktop environment that respects the XDG standards.
I use Ferdium on my desktop and self host my server for it, then just add it through there. Works quite well. Plus, with Ferdium, I can add other services such as Discord, and Mastodon so, it’s sort of my go to hub for a lot of my social media.
Honestly, I don’t understand people downloading apps to run things like discord, facebook, spotify, and now lemmy. These are webpages, and were designed to work as webpages. So, best would be to use a web browser.
Native apps can give better performance and take up less resources. But to be honest I just miss the good ol days. I mean back then the web browser was the main thing you’d open on your PC but now it’s pretty much the only thing
It looks like neonmodem is available in the AUR, though it’s a CLI utility. If you’re looking for a GUI, there’s lemoa, but it’s currently unmaintained, or lemonade which appears to be pretty minimal.
Your options are pretty sparse, so you’re probably best off just using a browser if you’re looking for a GUI. I hate to be one of those guys, but you don’t need an app for everything; the browser can sometimes provide the best experience.
For Firefox this exists, all other browsers have this functionality directly implemented. Chromium-based browsers can usually be started with parameter –app=https://example.com to start example.com in a SSB/PWA-looking window.
Plus: With this you do not lose the ability to open links in new tabs and you have access to your default configuration for websites.
Way better than the overcomplex “Firefox PWAs” I suppose.
Yep. Technically it just creates a new tab that creates a popup with the requested URL and the created tab closes itself after the popup was created. So not really a PWA but just a popup with a website in it, but in most cases this is absolutely fine since you’re online anyways, and modern browsers are good with caching.
Yes, this is not a PWA system but an SSB implementation. In the context of this thread it’s fine since Lemmy is useless without Internet connection, so why bother with persistent local storage and not just rely on browser cache?
On Linux you can create a simple .desktop file and place it where your system can load it. It will be automatically placed in places where your other application’s desktop files are shown. On Windows you can create a shortcut and change the shortcut’s icon and place the shortcut file wherever you want.
I use this technique on my private Linux machines as well as on my work laptop (Windows 10).
Persistent local storage is a question of scale. For example having old posts and comments cached, or the entire UI. It would just load faster and save tons of duplicated data that is always the same but downloaded over and over again.
Yes I know how to create the entry. Not sure about the menu chapter, but these are very possible.
It’s not exactly desktop, but I use Voyager. It’s a web app. You can also self host it if you don’t want to use the developer instance (I’ve got mine running in docker for desktop use. I use the Voyager app for iOS)
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